good film but with many flaws

Boring, long, and too preachy.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

"Valerie" is a movie that only gets better the more you watch of the film. Up until the last 15 minutes or so, I wasn't that impressed with the story (or Miss Ekberg's acting) but it all got very exciting towars teh end...making it well worth seeing.The story begins with a mass murder. John Garth (Sterling Hayden) leaves a home after a shooting which left three people dead and his wife shot and close to death. The film shows both his account and hers of the events leading up to the shooting...a shooting he claims was in self defense. What really happened?In some ways, this story is like the classic Japanese film "Rashomon", though instead of three viewpoints you have two...and teasing apart what REALLY happened is a bit easier in "Valerie". It's a simpler story...but still well done. As I mentioned above, my only quibble was some of Ekberg's acting....it often wasn't great and her accent was a bit thick, so, if possible, watch with captions.

Like in "the iron sheriff" ,which also features Hayden as the lead,the movie begins when many important events happened .In this whodunit disguised as western, the hero wanted to piece together the past ,meeting several suspects ,during his son' s trial .We watched the story through different eyes .The same goes for "Valerie" which is nothing but a long flashback;whereas the scenes are told by the hero or his lawyer or by the showdown's victim,the story takes an entirely new meaning .The main inspiration is not the traditional western,but rather Japanese Kurosawa's "Rashomon"(1950) -which was remade by Martin Ritt as ""the outrage" (1964) The story sustains interest throughout ,except for the final scenes which are botched.Anita Ekberg possesses enough ambiguity to pass for an angel or a demon.Sterling Hayden is ,as usual,an imposing individual,even in the scenes of his trial when he is supposed to keep a low profile.

Valerie is directed by Gerd Oswald and written by Leonard Heiderman and Emmett Murphy. It stars Sterling Hayden, Anita Ekberg and Anthony Steel. Music is by Albert Glasser and cinematography by Ernest Laszlo.John Garth (Hayden) is arrested and put on trial for the wounding of his wife Valerie (Ekberg) and murder of her parents. The trial hinges on three testimonies, each telling in flashback what actually unfolded to lead up to the bloodshed. But who is telling the truth?Set in the West, a murder mystery with a noirish edge, with crisp black and white photography keeping things in the ream of sombre, Valerie is a mixed bag. Yet it works as entertainment, the screenplay has some surprises in store, where it's not afraid to paint a world of wanton desires, seedy suspicions, violent mistreatment and possible war tainted masochistic tendencies. The court case at the centre of tale throws up the sometimes fragility of the law, with some biased spice and hurtful hearsay added into the mix, and it all builds nicely to a dramatically bleak finale. Hayden delivers one for his fans, all straight backed machismo and menacing drawl, and Ekberg scores well as a scenic beauty who deftly pulls off a dual portrayal that calls for seduction or victim credibility. Steel, Ekberg's real life beau, is a bit lightweight but doesn't harm the drama, while there's not much airy landscapes to enjoy (filmed on location at Iverson Ranch in Chatsworth). Still, this is very much one for fans of the stars to seek out, whilst noir and Western fans will find pleasures too. 7/10

Respected rancher and Civil War veteran John Garth (Sterling Hayden) goes on trial for killing his in-laws and wounding his wife Valerie (Anita Ekberg) but flashbacks from the witness stand give conflicting accounts of what happened...Gerd Oswald's moody RASHOMON-like western doesn't explore the nature of truth the way Kurosawa's film does (in this case, someone's lying and someone isn't) but it's interesting to see how the same words and deeds can be used to bolster both the prosecution and the defense. In Garth's version, he's a long-suffering cuckold whose immigrant wife is a greedy slut with a yen for anything in pants while her testimony paints the war-hardened vet (who's job was getting information from enemy prisoners) as a sadistic psycho who's sole pleasure is making her life pure hell. There's also testimony from the town's Reverend (Ekberg's real-life husband, Anthony Steel) who's accused of being Valerie's latest paramour but in a rousing finale the real story comes out -and not a moment too soon, otherwise the townsfolk would have believed the wrong party. The film's been called a "noir western" but that has more to do with the adult themes than any Expressionistic, shadowy photography which would have been difficult in any event due to the sparse use of night scenes. The German émigré director painted it black in other ways and pushed the Production Code envelope by making it clear in Valerie's testimony that Garth raped his bartered bride on their wedding night, beat and belittled her for being a foreigner, accused her of adultery with both his brother and the Reverend, attempted to abort their unborn child, and tortured her with lit cigars. Whew. Prematurely weathered Sterling Hayden's dour demeanor doesn't give away the denouement (although his account does seem stilted) and as the titular enigma, Anita Ekberg looks gorgeous in period costumes but her overdone make-up makes the shapely Swedish somnambulist look like a modern day glamor girl, something the filmmakers no doubt intended as a come-on to entice audiences. That said, it's compelling trash with an ample amount of mayhem and well worth tracking down. Oswald & Ekberg reunited the following year for Columbia's SCREAMING MIMI, a lurid, gritty little B-noir psycho-thriller that predicted the Italian giallo cycle of the 1960s.